Life After a PhD: What Can You Do?

Local: Auditorium Prof. Dr. José Marques Dos Santos

Date: Monday, June 30^th, 2025 | 09h10-09h35

Chair: Tânia Lopes, Assistant Researcher, LEPABE/ALiCE/FEUP

Lecturers: Bruno Béu, Advisor to FCT’s Board of Directors; Rui Munhá, Science Officer, FCT

Career Horizons for Early-Stage Researchers

Fostering high-quality research careers and broadening the diversity of career pathways – including through integrated approaches to collaborative, disciplinary, geographical and intersectoral mobilities – are key priorities for strengthening the competitiveness of research systems. Public policy has a critical role in shaping more inclusive, collaborative, and internationalised research ecosystems, and FCT has been translating these objectives into new and innovative approaches, in view of establishing an effective continuum between national and European frameworks. The relevance of career planning, investment in networking, or horizontal skills development and other capacity building initiatives, gains new momentum with the ongoing transformation of how research is assessed and the transition to a new paradigm of evaluation models. This presentation explores the present and future national, European and international funding schemes with particular emphasis on structured career planning and progression, mobility, and cross-sectoral collaboration. It also highlights models that support talent circulation, engagement with non-academic sectors, and institutional capacity-building to attract and retain researchers.

Biography

Bruno Béu holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Lisbon. His academic work focused on philosophy of language, literature, aesthetics and linguistics, and he has taught in several of these fields at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon. He was the principal investigator of an interdisciplinary research line in comparative studies, developed in collaboration with national institutions, and is the author or editor of two books and numerous articles and book chapters.
He has held various roles in science and research policy, including senior scientific officer for the Humanities and Social Sciences at the Evaluation Office of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT), advisor to the Lisbon City Council in the field of education, and executive coordinator of the academic open access publishing house Imprensa de História Contemporânea.
He currently serves as advisor to the FCT Board of Directors in the areas of strategy and evaluation and is director of the ERC-Portugal programme. He is the national delegate to the ERC Programme Committee and to the OECD’s Committee for Scientific and Technological Policy (CSTP), and the designated focal point for the Portuguese delegation to all OECD bodies in the field of STI. He also co-chairs the Portuguese National Chapter of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CNP-CoARA).

Biography

Rui Munhá has been a Science Officer in the Department of International Relations of the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) since 2014. He is currently Co-Coordinator of the National Contact Points of the European Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon Europe, and he also represents FCT and Portugal in different governing bodies in the context of the European Union or International Organisations. Rui Munhá obtained a PhD in Chemistry in 2011, and he developed his scientific activity at the University of Lisbon, University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada), University of California (Irvine, USA) and the University of Aveiro. Rui was born in Lisbon, in 1979.

Local: Auditorium Prof. Dr. José Marques Dos Santos

Date: Monday, June 30^th, 2025 | 09h35-10h00

Chair: Jaime Cardoso, Vice President of FEUP Scientific Council

Lecturer: João Lobo Ferreira, Head of Interface Mission, ANI